Annex C: Understanding the statistics in this bulletin

C.1 Individual offenders may be proceeded against
on more than one occasion; on each occasion they may be proceeded
against for more than one charge. The units of measurement used in
this bulletin, which may be different to those in other criminal
justice statistics publications, are:

(a) the
person or company proceeded against or convicted
People are counted once for each occasion they are
proceeded against. If a person is proceeded against more than once
on the same day, each proceeding will be counted separately.
References to 'people' include companies.

Where a person is proceeded against for more than one crime or
offence in a single proceeding, only the
main charge is counted. The main charge is the one
receiving the most severe penalty (or disposal) if one or more
charges are proved, and is identified using a look-up table which
ranks the disposal types in order of importance. For example,
custody is ranked higher than a monetary fine, so for a proceeding
where there was a mixture of these two types of disposal, the main
charge counted for this record would be the charge associated with
the custody disposal rather than the charge related to the monetary
disposal.

A
person convicted is defined to be one who had a
plea of 'guilty' accepted, or who was proved guilty of at least one
charge as a result of a trial. Throughout this bulletin, the terms
'people convicted' and 'convictions' are used interchangeably. If
the case does not reach the courts then the main charge within the
case that reaches the furthest stage in the criminal justice system
e.g. if the case is disposed of via a non-court disposal by the
police or the
COPFS.

(b)
individual offender
In the period covered by this bulletin, each
offender convicted of a crime or offence will have been assigned a
unique reference number by Police Scotland. This enables all
convictions relating to an individual offender to be linked
together, so that analysis of the number of convictions per
offender in any given year, or the number of their previous
convictions, can be derived. The Scottish Government also publishes
information on reconvictions in the publication
Reconviction
rates in Scotland.

(c)
individual offences
In addition to analysing people convicted by the
main charge involved, data in relation to individual offences which
are proved are also available.
Tables 4a and
4b show aggregate figures for offences by
crime type.

C.2 Generally only the initial outcome is included
in the court proceedings statistics so that, for example, a person
fined is regarded as fined even if he or she subsequently goes to
prison in default of payment. Similarly, no account is taken of the
outcome of appeals; the exception to this is for those crimes where
an appeal is determined prior to publication and the conviction is
quashed or the sentence is substituted.

C.3 The number of prosecutions and sentences given
could be influenced by operational practices within the justice
system. For example there may be times when the police report a
particular offence to the procurator fiscal but, when the facts and
circumstances are examined, the procurator fiscal decides to
proceed with an alternative charge. There are rare occasions when
such decisions are made but unfortunately, the charge is not then
updated on the computerised records. There is nothing to suggest
that the scale of this issue is large enough to alter the overall
trends reported.

C.4 A court can impose more than one penalty in
appropriate cases. For example, a fine can be imposed in addition
to a more severe penalty, such as custody. The main additional
punishments are generally disqualification from holding or
obtaining a driving licence and the endorsement of a driving
licence. Please note that although statistics on driving licence
disqualifications are not published in this output they are
available on request.

C.5 In the court proceedings statistics, the
reference year used is the year in which the person is sentenced.
For example if a person pleads to, or is convicted for, a charge in
2008-09, but is not sentenced until 2009-10, all events are
recorded as occurring in 2009-10. The age of each person is
calculated as at the date of sentence or acquittal.

C.6 Figures for sentence lengths imposed include
any element imposed for bail aggravation under section 27(1)(b) of
the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, and under section 16 of
the Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993 (where
the offender committed an offence following release from custody on
licence prior to the end of a previous sentence period
imposed).

C.7 Aggravators can be recorded to provide
additional information relating to the nature of a charge. For
example, someone who commits an assault which is motivated by
malice towards the victim as a result of their religion might have
their offence recorded under "common assault" with an aggravator
code of "religious" hatred.

C.8 The set of aggravator codes that are used on
the
CHS include
statutory aggravators which are those introduced through
legislation, such as the religious or racial aggravators, and a
"domestic" abuse aggravator code, which is used to highlight
particular cases to the police,
COPFS
or
SCTS.
Examples of statutory aggravators are:

C.9 Statistics on offences with a bail aggravator
recorded , which identify offences that were committed while the
offender was on bail, are available in the "
Additional
data" page.

Comparisons with other sources

C.10 Care should be taken when comparing different
data sources relating to the criminal justice system. For example
recorded crime statistics count crimes and
offences at the time that they came to the attention of Police
Scotland while criminal proceedings statistics report on cases
which have concluded in court. This means that a crime may be
recorded by the police in one year and court proceedings concluded
in a subsequent year. In addition, a person may be proceeded
against for more than one crime involving more than one victim and
there is the possibility that the crime recorded by the police may
be altered in the course of judicial proceedings.

C.11COPFS
publish a number of outputs, including
annual
figures relating to the number of cases reported to procurators
fiscal each year, and the number of cases disposed of each year, by
type of disposal. Some of these figures are presented in
table 1 clearly marked as cases. Each
COPFS
case includes at least one charge, similar to criminal proceedings,
but may involve more than one offender. The criminal proceedings
statistics count individual people disposed of. It is not currently
possible to extract information on some of the other
COPFS
non-court disposals from the
CHS e.g.
warnings and no actions.

C.12 The
COPFS
also publish charge level statistics in publications such as
Hate
Crime in Scotland and
Domestic
Abuse Charges reported to the
COPFS.
The counting base for these statistics are at individual charge
level rather than case level. As Criminal Proceedings statistics
only measure the main charge in a case it would be expected that
the
COPFS
figures would be higher. There will also be timing differences
since the
COPFS
figures are based on the year of the report to
COPFS,
while the Criminal Proceedings figures are based on year of
disposal.

C.13 Custodial disposals are counted differently
from the direct sentenced prison receptions (excluding fine default
receptions) published in the Scottish Government
Prison Statistics publications. Most of this
difference is because a person given custodial sentences for
separate sets of charges on the same day is counted as two
custodial sentences in the criminal proceedings statistics, but
only one direct sentence reception in the prison statistics.

C.14 Community sentence disposals are also counted
on a slightly different basis from the statistics in Criminal
Justice Social Work (
CJSW)
publications. The differences between the two sources include:

Where two or more identical orders have been issued to run
concurrently, the
CJSW
information only counts one order, whereas the criminal
proceedings statistics will count more than one.

Criminal proceedings data counts the penalty of first
disposal whereas
CJSW data
includes orders given subsequent to the initial disposal (e.g. as
a result of fine default, following an appeal etc.)

The date on which the order is deemed to be given can vary
between the two collections, particularly where the penalty is
given on a different date from the plea/verdict.

C.15 Please note that statistics on Restriction of
Liberty Orders (
RLOs) will
not match
statistics
published by G4S, the Scottish Government's contractor for
electronic monitoring. This is because statistics in this
publication are representative of the main charge in a set of
proceedings and will mask
RLOs issued
for secondary charges. In the case of
RLOs, it is
common for Community Payment Orders (
CPOs) to be
issued in combination where there is more than one conviction
within a proceeding but only the
CPO will be
counted. By contrast the G4S figures count all
RLOs issued
by the courts relating to all charges.

Comparisons with statistics from other
countries

C.16 Direct comparisons with statistics from other
countries should be taken with care as legal frameworks and
legislation for criminal offences differ. In addition, data
collection techniques and recording definitions will vary
considerably. For example, the Ministry of Justice court statistics
are based on information directly captured from the court's
operational databases and are typically published by calendar year.
By contrast these statistics for Scotland are from the
CHS, a police
database that collates information from the
COPFS
and the
SCTS, and
are published on a financial year basis.

C.17 Despite international differences, Criminal
Proceedings statistics are included in international reports
collated by the United Nations and Eurostat such as: